Recently I came into posession of a few Apple Xserves. The one in question today is an Xserve G5, RackMac3,1 , which was built when Apple at the top—and bottom—of it's PowerPC era. This isn't the first Xserve—that honor belongs to the G4 1 . And it wasn't the last—there were a few generations of Intel Xeon-powered RackMacs that followed. But in my opinion, it was the most interesting. Unfortunately, being manufactured in 2004, this Mac's Delta power supply suffers from the Cap...

“I know we are going to take a very long road, into darkness; but I know I can't turn back.” ― The Lord of the Rings Black Abyss Waitomo is mostly known for their glowworm caves. Most people book a short boat ride to view the countless New Zealand glowworms ( Arachnocampa luminosa ). I probably wouldn't include this activity in my trip if there wasn't a much more adventurous alternative: the Black Abyss , a caving tour. After putting on a wetsuit, you start with a 35 m a...

It’s long been believed the constantly rising costs of new home construction, and lackluster improvements in construction productivity more generally, are fundamentally a problem of production methods. Most houses in the US are still built on-site, using manual labor and hand tools, a manner of construction that doesn’t seem all that different from construction in the 19th century. By contrast, sectors like agriculture and manufacturing have shifted from this type of “craft production,” ...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Patrick Rhone, whose blog can be found at patrickrhone.net . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? My name is Patrick Rhone. When I'm not tryi...

Years in the jet teach you one thing above all else: the enemy gets a vote. I spent the better part of my career strapped into an F-16, training day in and day out to be ready when the call came. Air combat doesn’t sit still. Every generation brings new aircraft, new tactics, new threats. For decades, we owned the skies because our platforms, our training, and our operational concepts set the pace. That edge has eroded as near-peer adversaries have built modern fighters and layered air defen...

Whenever I have Claude do something for me, I feel nothing about the results. It feels like something happens around me, not through me. That's the new level of abstraction: you stop writing code and start describing intent. You stop crafting and start delegating. I've been doing this professionally long enough to have an opinion, and I don't like what it's doing to me. All of it focuses on getting things done rather than on quality or craft. I'm more productive than I've ever been. ...

La plus grande ville d’un pays bilingue mérite le transport en commun bilingue. Vu l’intérêt prolongé pour la francisation de la ville reine, voici enfin un plan du réseau traduit. Il y a plusieurs ans, un internaut traduisit le plan du réseau de la Société de transport de Montréal . La règle est simple : traduire le nom de chaque station, soit de français en anglais, soit d’anglais en français. Puisque le plan original mélange nos langues nationales, tout traduire le rend ...

Archbot flagged a "blocker" on a PR. It cited the diff, built a plausible chain of reasoning, and suggested a fix. It was completely wrong. Not "LLMs are sometimes wrong" wrong — more like convincing enough that a senior engineer spent 20 minutes disproving it . The missing detail wasn't subtle. It was a guard clause sitting in a helper two files away. Archbot just didn't have that file. That failure mode wasn't a prompt problem. It was a context problem . So I stopped trying to pr...

I saw this while perusing my RSS feeds last night, and thought it was interesting. In all honesty, I've completely moved away from WordPress since all the drama a while ago. But this is quite cool - My WordPress is basically a version of WordPress that runs entirely in your browser. You visit my.wordpress.net it downloads some files to your machine, and you have WordPress - no install, no sign up. Just a private WordPress instance in your browser that only you can visit. Obviously if y...

TL;DR; No - AI won’t kill open source, but it will reshape it. Small, single-purpose packages (micro open source) are likely to languish as AI agents write trivial utility code on the fly. But major frameworks, databases, and runtimes like Django, Postgres, and Python itself aren’t going anywhere - AI agents actually prefer reaching for established building blocks over reinventing them. The key is staying in the architect’s seat. AI will replace the trivial, leave the foundational, a...

How far can you go with IX Route Servers only? On paper internet exchanges (IX) are very simple in their implementation, simply put together a bunch of routers on a shared layer 2 ethernet switch How far can you go with IX Route Servers only? On paper internet exchanges (IX) are very simple in their implementation, simply put together a bunch of routers on a shared layer 2 ethernet switch How far can you go with IX Route Servers only? On paper internet exchanges (IX) are very simp...

How isogenies can solve Bitcoin's Quantum problems How isogenies can solve Bitcoin's Quantum problems

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Last week we simulated a queueing algorithm. Behind the scenes, I did this by writing a Go program and placing sleeps to simulate processing. This meant that running a simulation took a while. I ran each one for about a minute, and adding more simulations where I varied parameters took longer and longer. How might we run simulations that don't use the real computer clock? One way to model such a thing is as a stream of events , which is a stream of tuples of (time passed before something ha...

Hello! My big takeaway from last month’s musings about man pages was that examples in man pages are really great, so I worked on adding (or improving) examples to two of my favourite tools’ man pages. Here they are: the dig man page (now with examples) the tcpdump man page examples (this one is an update to the previous examples) the goal: include the most basic examples The goal here was really just to give the absolute most basic examples of how to use the tool, for peop...

Suppose that you have a record of your sales per day. You might want to get a running record where, for each day, you are told how many sales you have made since the start of the year. day sales per day running sales 1 10$ 10 $ 2 15$ 25 $ 3 5$ 30 $ Such an operation is called a prefix sum or a scan. Implementing it in C is not difficult. It is a simple loop. for ( size_t i = 1 ; i data [ 1 ] -> data [ 2 ] -> .....

I had insomnia last night, and thought it’d be fun to compile this list. Thank you. awk(1) bhyve Call for Testing Dragonfly BSD ee(1) FreeBSD got(1) httpd(1) illumos (I know, technically not…) Jails ksh(1) libressl meta-pkgs NetBSD OpenBSD pkgsrc quota rubenerd.com/tag/bsd/ sparc tcsh(1) ufs2 Vinyl Cache Wine Xfce who(1) are you… who who ? ZFS I will expand on my inclusion of Wine at some point, because it’s found surprising ...

In late January, I published a post 1 ( archive ) on the Databricks engineering blog about “SAFE”, the feature flagging and experimentation platform I’ve been working on for the past few years. SAFE is what I’ve been spending most of my time on during my time at Databricks, and it’s been rewarding to see the project grow from an initial prototype to a mature internal platform. I’ve been the tech lead for SAFE for a while now, and the project has scaled significantly in headcount,...

tl;dr I use AI heavily on this blog. I don’t use AI to write any content. As any followers of my blog will have seen recently, I am a big fan of the productivity —and enjoyment—that AI can bring to one’s work. (In fact, I firmly believe that to opt out of using AI is a somewhat negative step to take in terms of one’s career.) Here’s how I don’t use AI, and never will : tl;dr I use AI heavily on this blog. ...

There is a certain kind of computer review that is really a permission slip. It tells you what you’re allowed to want. It locates you in a taxonomy — student, creative, professional, power user — and assigns you a product. It is helpful. It is responsible. It has very little interest in what you might become. The MacBook Neo has attracted a lot of these reviews. The consensus is reasonable: $599, A18 Pro, 8GB RAM, stripped-down I/O. A Chromebook killer, a first laptop, a sensible machi...

Tech firm fined $1.1m by California for selling high-school students’ data I agree with Brian Marick’s response No such story should be published without a comparison of the fine to the company’s previous year revenue and profits, or valuation of last funding round. (I could only find a valuation of $11.0M in 2017.) We desperately need corporations’ attitudes to shift from “lawbreaking is a low-risk cost of doing business; we get a net profit anyway” to “this could ...

Turing Award winner and former Oxford professor  Tony Hoare passed away last Thursday at the age of 92. Hoare is famous for quicksort, ALGOL, Hoare logic and so much more. Jim Miles gives his personal reflections. Jill Hoare, Tony Hoare, Jim Miles. Cambridge, 7 September 2021 Last Thursday (5th March 2026), Tony Hoare passed away, at the age of 92. He made many important contributions to Computer Science, which go well beyond just the one for which most Maths/CompSci undergraduates might know ...

Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. Neale Donald Walsch I’m lucky that I have a job where I can work remotely as it allows me to live in a small community where there are no tech jobs anywhere close. It does require me to travel a few weeks per year to the office but I don’t mind that much as I appreciate minor dozes of socializing occasionally. I recently spent five nights on a trip with only a single backpack and it was a surprisingly great experience. How I used...